Skip to content

Philippines

Voices: The Philippines-China Arbitration Decision

  • by

Over the coming days, MAP will host a number of short expert commentaries assessing the merits award on fifteen claims the Philippines brought against China before an arbitration tribunal, as well as the implications of the award’s decisions for other disputes, in the South China Sea and elsewhere. Download the commentaries as a pdf here. July 27, 2016 Sumathy Permal, Senior Researcher at the Maritime Institute of Malaysia, provides these thoughts: “The Philippines case against China is an effort provided for under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which allows parties to institute compulsory dispute resolution procedures… Read More »Voices: The Philippines-China Arbitration Decision

Japanese Maritime Assistance: A Status Quo Plus

  • by

The prospect of a “normal” Japan is welcomed by some and approached cautiously by others; the related debate over whether Japan is undergoing defense policy revolution or evolution is well-developed among regional specialists. Neither interpretation seems entirely faithful to empirical evidence. If we take Japan’s maritime cooperation with Southeast Asia as emblematic of Tokyo’s expanding role in regional security, we can argue that Tokyo is ushering in important but incremental changes to defense policy that are consistently anchored to established institutional patterns. Firmly biased toward tightly civilian-controlled, nonmilitarized approaches to security, these patterns place limits on future defense options that… Read More »Japanese Maritime Assistance: A Status Quo Plus